Mind Wide Open

Steven Johnson is always a lucid, thoughtful, and insightful science writer, and his new book Mind Wide Open, if not quite as rich as his previous book Emergence, is nonetheless quite thought-provoking.
Johnson gives us a brief tour through recent discoveries and technologies in neuroscience, with special emphasis on their pragmatic implications. There are chapters on neurofeedback and MRI scans, on the brain circuits involved in the fear response, on hormones and neurotransmitters (and the drugs that closely mimic them), and on the psychophysiology of laughter and of attention. In each case, Johnson asks what these technologies or discoveries can tell us about ourselves: more specifically and autobiographically, he spells out what they helped him to learn about himself.
Though Johnson gives too much credit, I think, to the fantasies of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the two great pseudoscientific superstitions of our age, his emphasis is mostly on those aspects of recent psychology that actually do have a solid experimental and scientific basis: studies of the chemistry and the neural architecture of the brain.
Two aspects of the book particularly interest me. The first is where Johnson writes about “recreational” neurofeedback and neurochemistry. Most of the technologies he discusses are being developed for medical use: to help people with Attention Deficit Disorder or with Parkinson’s, for instance. But understanding how brain wave patterns and neurotransmitter levels affect mood, judgement, comprehension, and even creativity, and learning ways to alter one’s own patterns and levels at will, is potentially valuable for people in everyday situations as well. There are times when an adrenaline rush is useful, and other times when it just gets in the way; times when acute concentration might lead to a creative breakthrough, and times when distraction might be more helpful. Drugs are relatively crude tools, in comparison to being able to more precisely modulate one’s own neurochemical balances.
The second part of Mind Wide Open that especially interested me was Johnson’s conclusion, where he writes about how Freud stands up to recent neurobiological discoveries. Rather than indulge in fashionable Freud-bashing, he paints a rather nuanced picture. Contemporary brain science shows that Freud was right that much mental activity is unconscious, and that the seeming unity of the self is largely an illusion, since mental activity is made up of multiple, and often mutually contradictory, processes or “modules.” On the other hand, the part of Freud that Johnson rejects (or says that recent discoveries ought to lead us to reject) is the whole theory of repression. Instead of Freud’s “dynamic” model of the psyche, where energies get bottled up and need release, Johnson suggests that the new neuroscience leads us to “another metaphor: the brain as Darwinian ecosystem, instead of steam engine” (198). Understanding the mind is a matter of “pattern recognition instead of code breaking” (207): there is no deep, repressed meaning, no hidden censored core, behind the pattern of symptoms, and into which that pattern needs to be translated.
In one way, I find this an attractive demystification. But in another way, I wonder if it isn’t a cop-out, or an overly comforting idealization. For one thing, the metaphor of a “Darwinian ecosystem” is itself problematic. “Darwinian” implies struggle and competition, the brutal “survival of the fittest”, ultimately “nature red in tooth and claw” (which arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins regards as a fair and accurate description of natural selection). An “ecosystem,” on the other hand, suggests balance, mutuality, a federation of parts each of which is necessary to a whole that is thereby greater than the sum of its parts. The two words reflect two different biological visions, between which theoretical biologists are indeed antagonistically split today. They both probably represent partial truths, but reconciling them as Johnson implicitly does is something of a sleight-of-hand.
The deeper problem is that, in dispensing with Freudian repression, we are left with too much of a functionalist account of the brain or mind. Even the mind’s conflicts and dissonances serve a useful purpose; “in the Darwinian model, failures are a sign of success” (200). From the point of view of the all-embracing ecosystem (if not of the species that go extinct in the struggle) all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There’s not enough room in this picture for the nearly infinite perversity, whimsicality, self-defeating stubbornness, willful blindness, and obsession of which human minds are capable. While I don’t necessarily believe that Freud’s theories (castration, Oedipus, the death drive) are the best account, or even a good account, of why and how these things happen, I think that any theory that would relegate them to minor exceptions, or to failures of “normal” development — which is what a functionalist theory inevitably does — is unacceptable. Function needs to be explained in the larger context of dysfunction, rather than dysfunction being seen as only a deviation from, or failure of, otherwise ubiquitous function.

Steven Johnson is always a lucid, thoughtful, and insightful science writer, and his new book Mind Wide Open, if not quite as rich as his previous book Emergence, is nonetheless quite thought-provoking.
Johnson gives us a brief tour through recent discoveries and technologies in neuroscience, with special emphasis on their pragmatic implications. There are chapters on neurofeedback and MRI scans, on the brain circuits involved in the fear response, on hormones and neurotransmitters (and the drugs that closely mimic them), and on the psychophysiology of laughter and of attention. In each case, Johnson asks what these technologies or discoveries can tell us about ourselves: more specifically and autobiographically, he spells out what they helped him to learn about himself.
Though Johnson gives too much credit, I think, to the fantasies of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the two great pseudoscientific superstitions of our age, his emphasis is mostly on those aspects of recent psychology that actually do have a solid experimental and scientific basis: studies of the chemistry and the neural architecture of the brain.
Two aspects of the book particularly interest me. The first is where Johnson writes about “recreational” neurofeedback and neurochemistry. Most of the technologies he discusses are being developed for medical use: to help people with Attention Deficit Disorder or with Parkinson’s, for instance. But understanding how brain wave patterns and neurotransmitter levels affect mood, judgement, comprehension, and even creativity, and learning ways to alter one’s own patterns and levels at will, is potentially valuable for people in everyday situations as well. There are times when an adrenaline rush is useful, and other times when it just gets in the way; times when acute concentration might lead to a creative breakthrough, and times when distraction might be more helpful. Drugs are relatively crude tools, in comparison to being able to more precisely modulate one’s own neurochemical balances.
The second part of Mind Wide Open that especially interested me was Johnson’s conclusion, where he writes about how Freud stands up to recent neurobiological discoveries. Rather than indulge in fashionable Freud-bashing, he paints a rather nuanced picture. Contemporary brain science shows that Freud was right that much mental activity is unconscious, and that the seeming unity of the self is largely an illusion, since mental activity is made up of multiple, and often mutually contradictory, processes or “modules.” On the other hand, the part of Freud that Johnson rejects (or says that recent discoveries ought to lead us to reject) is the whole theory of repression. Instead of Freud’s “dynamic” model of the psyche, where energies get bottled up and need release, Johnson suggests that the new neuroscience leads us to “another metaphor: the brain as Darwinian ecosystem, instead of steam engine” (198). Understanding the mind is a matter of “pattern recognition instead of code breaking” (207): there is no deep, repressed meaning, no hidden censored core, behind the pattern of symptoms, and into which that pattern needs to be translated.
In one way, I find this an attractive demystification. But in another way, I wonder if it isn’t a cop-out, or an overly comforting idealization. For one thing, the metaphor of a “Darwinian ecosystem” is itself problematic. “Darwinian” implies struggle and competition, the brutal “survival of the fittest”, ultimately “nature red in tooth and claw” (which arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins regards as a fair and accurate description of natural selection). An “ecosystem,” on the other hand, suggests balance, mutuality, a federation of parts each of which is necessary to a whole that is thereby greater than the sum of its parts. The two words reflect two different biological visions, between which theoretical biologists are indeed antagonistically split today. They both probably represent partial truths, but reconciling them as Johnson implicitly does is something of a sleight-of-hand.
The deeper problem is that, in dispensing with Freudian repression, we are left with too much of a functionalist account of the brain or mind. Even the mind’s conflicts and dissonances serve a useful purpose; “in the Darwinian model, failures are a sign of success” (200). From the point of view of the all-embracing ecosystem (if not of the species that go extinct in the struggle) all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There’s not enough room in this picture for the nearly infinite perversity, whimsicality, self-defeating stubbornness, willful blindness, and obsession of which human minds are capable. While I don’t necessarily believe that Freud’s theories (castration, Oedipus, the death drive) are the best account, or even a good account, of why and how these things happen, I think that any theory that would relegate them to minor exceptions, or to failures of “normal” development — which is what a functionalist theory inevitably does — is unacceptable. Function needs to be explained in the larger context of dysfunction, rather than dysfunction being seen as only a deviation from, or failure of, otherwise ubiquitous function.